On her third studio album, Black Star, Amaarae wastes no time. From the start, she throws down the gauntlet, swirling her distinctive soprano vocals around Euro techno, baile funk, and Afrobeats like they’re a playground. The second track, “Starkilla” (featuring Bree Runway and Starkillers), is driven by a choppy, repetitive bass, as Amaarae sings about various class A and B drugs. On “B2B,” a deep house track that’s destined to be a club classic, she chants the lyrics, “I’ve been into you, I like what we do, now come into me, see my point of view,” almost as though she’s casting a spell—before transitioning into a haunting acoustic serenade.
“This time around, I was like, ‘Let’s have some fun,’” the Ghanaian-American says, sitting opposite me in a dimly lit corner of her label’s office, wearing her signature black-on-black. The project started in Miami last winter, after she performed a show with her producers and engineers in tow. The music started flowing and, well: “We were just having a good time!”
Amaarae later decamped to Brazil, where she immersed herself in “the culture and the people” before finally finishing the LP at her home in Los Angeles. “Usually we’d be in a studio for weeks or months,” she says. “[This time] we built a studio in my crib and just did it.” Unlike her previous projects (she “overthought things a lot” while making her smash-hit 2023 album Fountain Baby, she says), Black Star is an uninhibited record. It incorporates enigmatic affirmations with Bree Runway, a flirty appearance from PinkPantheress—and even a Naomi Campbell outro. “I really wanted to make a statement about my capability as a musician and a creative,” Amaarae tells me now. “To show people that I can do music in a higher art sense.”